Dynamic Deployment of Scientific Workflows in the Cloud Using Container Virtualization

Scientific workflows are increasingly being migrated to the Cloud. However, workflow developers face the problem of which Cloud to choose and, more importantly, how to avoid vendor lock-in. This is because there are a range of Cloud platforms, each with different functionality and interfaces. In this paper we propose a solution - a system that allows workflows to be portable across a range of Clouds. This portability is achieved through a new framework for building, dynamically deploying and enacting workflows. It combines the TOSCA specification language and container-based virtualization. TOSCA is used to build a reusable and portable description of a workflow which can be automatically deployed and enacted using Docker containers. We describe a working implementation of our framework and evaluate it using a set of existing scientific workflows that illustrate the flexibility of the proposed approach.